Inner Musings of a Wayward Writer

Fiction: ‘Near Death’

She never saw the other car coming. The air was thick with fog and practically ablaze with the rising sun. There was a hideous screech as tyres skidded across wet bitumen, and then one split-second passed that felt like a lifetime before the impact hit.

Bright orange flickered against shadows.

There were sirens and flashing lights.

And then a moment of darkness so consuming it was like being swallowed by a black hole. When she opened her eyes, the road was still before her, as clear as day. Her car began to rise as it sped along the highway, taking flight over the hills as swiftly as a sparrow. The world seemed to slip further and further away. Each scar and every memory of pain dissipated with the morning fog.

Now there was only freedom.

She drove on despite having no place to be.

Sunlight formed a pathway through the sky, so she turned onto this ethereal road and raced away. The ground vanished beneath her as she disappeared into the great blue sky. She tried not to focus on herself, but only on the clouds ahead as she felt something deep inside her mind fade ever so slightly.

Her senses began to dissolve.

Existence seemed so tiring.

She relaxed her grip on the wheel and let the atoms holding her being together drift apart and join all the other scattered particles in the air. Day turned to night. The piercing blue sky had transformed into a black void lit by a sea of stars. Thick clouds of cosmic dust and gas swirled around her like a veil, generating a nebula of shocking brilliance. She felt the wind from a nearby quasar sweeping her away. There was no sound, yet she could hear a deafening roar. Joining the particles of silicate, corundum and forsterite, she began to break down into a fine dust floating between the stars.

When she woke up, she was in a hospital bed with a network of tubes keeping her alive. She closed her eyes again and dreamed of oblivion.